The central character is Stella Rodney, a well-to-do divorcee in her early 40s (as Bowen, who had also had a highly unsatisfactory marriage, would have been at the time) and, like the author, with strong family connections to Ascendancy Ireland, though in Stella’s case through marriage. She works in some aspect of the government that the author never quite specifies, but which appears to give her and her colleagues access to sensitive information.
The narrative describes her as “young-looking… because of the impression she gave of still being on happy sensuous terms with life”. She is in love with a slightly younger colleague, Robert Kelway, a wounded Dunkirk veteran whose feelings about the war appear to have been turned by his experiences. One summer evening, however, she is visited at her flat by a man called Harrison, a meeting that changes her life.
We follow Stella to Ireland to revisit the house of her husband’s cousin, who rather absurdly had dropped dead on a trip to England while visiting his wife in a somewhat select institution for the mentally ill. Roderick, Stella’s son, barely out of his teens and serving in the Army, has inherited from his cousin the family pile in Ireland (as Bowen did her family’s); Stella must attend to some of the details of the inheritance.